How do I send a successful email campaign?

If you have a list of email addresses to which you'd like to send an email message (or several), here is some advice.

1. Consider coordinating with the Office of Marketing & Communications (omc@uah.edu) to use Emma for sending your email.
2. If you're not using Emma, verify with OIT that the service you're using has been designated as trusted. Any attempt to spoof a @uah.edu email address without OIT help could result in all sent messages being marked as spam.
3. Make sure your list only contains addresses for individuals who confirmed that they wished to receive the information you are sending.
4. If sending from a @uah.edu email account, consider the Gmail sending limits and whether or not you'll come close to exceeding them with your plan as it is.
5. It's encouraged to allow people to opt out of email campaigns, so consider using a Google Group. With groups, you could change the members as appropriate. Groups allow you to address all members with the same email address in your "to" field. Groups allow the recipient to opt out or adjust email delivery settings (abridged email, digest email, or all email). Also, the group has a website that serves as a single repository for all email traffic with this group (even as members change). Complete the Google Group Request Form if you need a new group created.

The following are tips culled from online articles (including this one from OptInMonster) about how to avoid spam filters:

1. Make sure you include your office’s physical address.
2. Test your message with ISnotSPAM a free tool which scores your emails for deliverability and see if they are likely to trigger spam filters.
3. Avoid the following words, which some spam filters are triggered by when they're in the subject line or the body of the email:
   • amazing
   • cancel at any time
   • check or money order
   • click here
   • congratulations
   • dear friend
   • for only ($)
   • free or toll-free
   • great offer
   • guarantee
   • increase sales
   • order now
   • promise you
   • risk free
   • special promotion
   • this is not spam
   • winner
4. Make sure your HTML Emails Follow Best Practices. If you are sending text-only emails, you don’t have to worry about this. However, you may want to send HTML emails as well as a text-only version. That way, you can include some branding elements that make your emails more memorable (which helps with engagement).
5. Some tests have shown that branded emails yield a higher response rate than plain text emails; check out this article's advice for limiting colors, font sizes, and images.
6. Use these rules for sending HTML emails so they don’t get marked as spam:
   • Use a maximum width of 600-800 pixels. This will make them look good in most email clients.
   • Keep your HTML code as simple and clean as possible. If you are using a template from a reputable email service provider, you should be OK.
   • Keep your image-to-text ratio low. Images are OK to include in your email marketing campaigns, but never send image-only emails with no text.
   • Optimize your images for email by compressing them first. Don’t use super high resolution images or other media with a large file size.
   • Don’t use obscure fonts. Stick with fonts that work across platforms, like Arial, Verdana, Georgia and Times New Roman.
   • Optimize for mobile. Make sure your emails are readable and load quickly on mobile devices, and that your links can be pressed easily with a thumb.

OIT made changes on December 15, 2020 to reduce email spoofing (malicious entities from sending email with a false from address of @uah.edu). With this change, we now enable DMARC email authentication; we use the quarantine option to direct email servers to increase the spam score of spoofed email messages. A spoofed email is a message that appears to originate from a @uah.edu email address but is not from an approved UAH email server. This change will increase the likelihood that any spoofed email will be marked as spam whether the email is sent to a UAH email account or outside account.

Since February 2020, OIT has been using the none option for DMARC to report on what would have been stopped. We feel confident that we now have all legitimate services designated as approved. If you would like to verify that a service used by your group has been designated as such, please email helpdesk@uah.edu and list the service and email addresses used to send emails as @uah.edu email accounts or to UAH email accounts.

If you need assistance, please contact the Help Desk by emailing helpdesk@uah.edu or by calling 256-824-3333.